Trump’s Racism in Context

Representative Maxine Waters, who last year referred to Crimea as ‘Korea’, continues to appear on news programs, topping her accusation that Donald Trump is a racist by pointing out his good relations with Vladimir Putin.

More importantly, it has taken five months from the time Nazis held a torchlight parade in Charlottesville, Virginia in protests that ended up with many injured and one dead, for the American media to dare to condemn President Trump for calling certain countries ‘shitholes’. If you’re wondering what could possibly explain this failure, I suggest it is only partly due to journalists’ need to maintain access to important new sources. It’s primarily about America’s overall lack of ideological literacy, which includes knowing which other attitudes accompany the rough division of the world into ‘right’ and ‘left’.

European journalists, brought up on the history of the Second World War against fascism, in which socialists and communists played major roles in local resistance to Germany while the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis in Eastern Europe. cover the campaigns of fascists, communists and every conceivable ideology in-between. Thus they reported Charlottesville in its political context, calling out the Alt-Right demonstrators as fascists.

The failure of the US media to do likewise allowed Steve Bannon to become increasingly influential in the Trump White House, as currently acknowledged by references to his one remaining ally, Stephen Miller who at thirty-two is probably the youngest Presidential Senior Policy Advisor in history. Even people who have never seen the Italian classical film ‘The Conformist’ that depicts pre-war Italian fascists, instinctively fear him, and he is the only person I have ever seen go toe to toe with a tough anchor like Jake Tapper.

Their prolonged sparring match over media coverage of the Trump White House and the Alt-Right in general is illustrative of a major world turning point: the historic left-right divide is now subdividing into a Caucasian minority and what I call the honey-colored majority and its supporters, known as ‘multiculturalists’. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Alt-Right represents a desperate attempt by Caucasians to cling to power in the face of their arithmetically determined minority status. Unfortunately, lacking ideological literacy, the American press is incapable of contextualizing the President’s reference to ‘shit-hole’ countries, able only to point out that it makes the US look bad.